The Place prize is dance's equivalent of the Turner or Man Booker prizes. Awarded annually, and sponsored by the business news organisation Bloomberg, it's worth £25,000 to the winning choreographer, a career-changing sum in the church-mouse world of dance. On Wednesday, in a programme to be repeated over the next 10 days, the four finalists saw their works performed back to back.

Begin to Begin, the opening work by Eva Recacha, is an absurdist meditation on death, set to the nursery rhyme "Michael Finnegan". Recacha employs a highly composed movement vocabulary which explores, very beautifully, notions of weight and collapse. Her underlying references are those of Christian iconography – Pietàs, crucifixions, depositions – and versions of these are repetitively deployed so that time itself takes on an accordion-pleated texture, and death becomes an endlessly rehearsed event whose finality can never quite be established.

It Needs Horses, by Lost Dog (Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer) is more broadly theatrical. Chris Evans is a shagged-out clown, Anna Finkel his blearily down-at-heel partner, and together, locked into sour mutual dependency, they explore the wilder shores of abjection. Hopelessly inept, the pair soon abandon conventional attempts at entertainment in favour of a hilariously grim display of pseudo-erotica, culminating in a finale in which, as she triumphantly dry-humps him, he holds out his hat to the audience for money.

Riccardo Buscarini and Antonio de la Fe Guedes's Cameo is a precision-crafted exercise in noir styling. There's a Chesterfield sofa, a side-table with a whisky decanter and tumblers, raking lighting and a throbbing cello score, to which two men and a woman assume jump-cut, suspenseful attitudes. In its clear debt to Alfred Hitchcock, the piece follows on from Ian Spink's Further and Further Into Night (1984) and Matthew Bourne's Deadly Serious (1992), both of which deconstructed the director's work with greater insight and wit. Cameo is suitably claustrophobic, but, fatally, it fails to surprise us.

Fidelity Project, by Freddie Opoku-Addaie and Frauke Requardt, is at once the least finished and the most vital of the evening's offerings. It shows the two choreographers locked in a retributive, kinetic duel, causing each other the kind of suffering that only deep familiarity can engender. They're an arresting couple: she sturdily German, he slight and infused with Anglo-African politesse, and there's a telling sequence in which she slams him to the floor before turning away with a flickering, demure smile. As in the Lost Dog piece, pain is the glue that binds.

It's not this column's habit to give shout-outs to corporate sponsors, but Bloomberg is to be congratulated for supporting an event which, over the years, has given rise to some exceptional work. Contemporary dance is not one of the glamour arts, and if anyone from the organisation was present on Wednesday's opening night, I hope you enjoyed the crisps in the interval. This year's winner will be announced here on 16 April. I liked Eva Recacha's piece best, but suspect Lost Dog will win.